Buying Meat is Obviously Worse than Bestiality

*Spoiler Alert*: The conclusion is that both are wrong, don't worry!

I am not going to use an image of bestiality here for obvious reasons. So you will just have to live with a painting of some meat.

Reader Discretion is Advised

Some days ago (probably quite a few days ago when you are reading this, since I have had an exam), I read a Reddit post arguing that if bestiality is wrong, then eating meat is wrong too (I can see it has since been removed). I thought this conclusion was obvious, but (not really) to my surprise, a lot of people didn’t. So I thought it would be fun (and also make for a provocative title), to defend this position and answer a few of the bad objections people gave. So basically this post will be the blog equivalent of this:

A Few Caveats

First off, one point where some people majored in minors was that eating meat itself isn’t wrong. That is obvious - or, well some think that eating meat is bad in itself because it somehow symbolically expresses endorsement of the meat industry, but I think that is just an aesthetic judgement rather than a moral one. Instead, what is wrong is buying meat and thereby raising the demand for it; what you do with it afterwards is really irrelevant (unless you go around hitting people with it or something, obviously). If you refer to the title of this post, you will also see the word “buying” for this very reason.

Secondly, some people pointed out that there might be ethical ways of sourcing meat. I actually agree with this, but it is also besides the point. What the statement is getting at is that many people have strange attitudes towards the two actions: If I told someone that I had bought a chicken for dinner, most people wouldn’t care at all. But if I told them that I had had sex with a chicken before dinner, most people would lose their shit (this is the technical term). And it is not just out of disgust; if I told people that I had a scat fetish the reactions would probably not be positive, but they also wouldn’t be the same outrage as if I told them I regularly have sex with animals. Rather it is because most people think that there is something deeply wrong with having sex with animals.

Why this difference in attitudes? I think there are many plausible explanations, mostly that we are very used to the thought of buying meat, and aren’t seeing the effects of our actions when we do so. But I don’t think that the explanation is that the former is permissible while the latter isn’t (just to be clear, I think that both are impermissible).

I also feel it will be necessary to make a final clarification, which I know some people will get completely stuck on otherwise. I am not saying that people who buy meat are more “evil” or “malicious” than people who commit bestiality. Bestiality is correlated with lower empathy, difficulty in emotional attachment and other negative character traits, so obviously people who perform bestiality are more likely to have a worse character than people who buy meat. But I am saying that the action of buying meat is morally worse than the action performing bestiality, even if the people who perform the latter are probably generally less nice and more malicious people than most of the people who perform the former - a vegan who has sex with animal will have a less bad impact on the world than a meat-eater who does not have sex with animals.

How Bad Are They?

In order to make this comparison, it will be in order that we compare the badness of the two actions.

Bestiality

It is actually quite hard to find much research on the harm bestiality has on animals. Most research is concerned with the psychological characteristics of the perpetrators of bestiality and the correlation with other forms of abuse. Although it is possible to find some information. I think it will be useful to distinguish the physical and psychological harm done.

The physical harm is quite straightforward. Bestiality often causes internal injury to the animals. One article i found, detailed how to investigate whether an animal was the victim of sexual abuse. Here were of course described common injuries to such animals, for example:

Animal victims of sexual abuse may have a variety of injuries to the anus/rectum and genitalia, while others have no such injuries despite sexual contact. Vaginal and uterine lesions in ASA victims include recurrent vaginitis, vaginal prolapse, uterine tears near the cervix, vaginal stricture, cervical scarring, uterine hemorrhage, and the presence of intrauterine, intracervical, or vaginal foreign objects.

(Stern et al., 2016, Veterinary Forensic Pathology of Animal Sexual Abuse)

This of course only applies to the animals who survive - many animals die during the act (I weren’t able to find statistics over this, but there are at least recorded cases (Chandra et al., 2021, Bestiality: A Cruelty Towards Animal)). So it looks quite clear that it probably isn’t a particularly physically enjoyable experience for the animal, at least in many cases.

It is much harder to find any information on the psychological effects of sexual abuse on animals. In fact, the best I was able to do was this article, which describes how “unusual meekness in an animal” can be a sign of sexual abuse. So there is certainly signs that bestiality can cause a certain sort of mental trauma to animals (although it is not clear whether this is caused by potential physical abuse during the act, or the act itself). On the other hand, some places (including the Wikipedia article on Zoophilia) seem to suggest that there can be cases where the animals seem to enjoy the relationship absent sadism.

So bestiality can in many cases cause severe internal physical damage to animal and even death. Apart from that, it also seems as though it can traumatize the victims, at least in some cases.

I will say that this research has been done during an afternoon while I procrastinate going to bed, and so it is very likely that there are many more detailed findings that I have been unable to find. But this is just a blog post, so I will not sink more hours into it at this point.

Buying Factory Farmed Meat

The question of the harm done to factory farmed animals, on the other hand, is a lot more well-researched and documented, making this section a bit more straightforward.

In my last post on meat-eating I explained how the expected harm done to an animal by your buying some animal product could be calculated with the following formula (I think my explanation in that post maybe wasn’t the most straightforward, but it made sense in my head at the time):

Here “ProductHarm” is the expected amount of harm you cause an animal by buying a given animal product. “AnimalHarm” is the total amount of suffering endured by that animal, “ProductIncome” is the amount of income the farm got from selling the product you bought, and “AnimalIncome” is the total amount of income the farm got from that animal.

Using a whole chicken here is probably the easiest example. If you buy a whole chicken you will be paying for, well, the whole chicken, so product income will be very close to animal income (there are still some byproducts of poultry production which are used for other things). So the question is basically how great the animal harm is.

Broiler chickens have very little space - about that of an A4 paper per chicken - for an animal weighing more than 2 kg. The chickens in these environments become very stressed and very bored, and as an outlet for this, they resort to pecking the feathers of other chickens and even cannibalizing them. To stop this, farmers simply cut off the beaks of chickens. This is often done sloppily, leading to all sorts of problems like burn blisters in the mouth. And even when done correctly, the beak contains nerves, meaning the procedure is very painful - probably similar to someone cutting of your nose with a hot knife. The chickens grow so fast in their 7-week life, that they can barely support themselves under their own weight. Since they stand in their own waste - which is high in ammonia - they breathe very unpleasant fumes constantly, and often get hock burns (a form of chemical burn) and blisters on their feet, legs and breasts. The first and last times in their lives they see the sun will be when they are thrown into crates and taken to a processing plant to be killed and packaged.¹

So when you buy a whole chicken you are basically causing this amount of harm to be done to a chicken.

The harm will probably be lower in other cases. By far the least bad factory farmed meat to buy is beef. Not only are cows the largest animals that are farmed in factory farms, beef cows are also much more well off than probably all other factory farmed animals.

According to this a cow can be turned into around 200lbs of ground beef. This graph shows that around 40% of beef sales are ground beef. Let us assume that this is representative of how much of the profit of a single cow comes from ground beef. This would mean that for a single pound of ground beef the “ProductIncome” would be responsible for around 0.4/200=0.002 or 0.2% of the “AnimalIncome”. A beef cow lives for around 1.5-2 years in a factory farm - let’s say 600 days. That means that means that buying a single pound of ground beef will be equivalent to causing a beef cow to live 600*0.002=1.2 days in a factory farm, which translates to 24 waking hours, since cows sleep for around 4 hours a day.²

Out of this, about 2/3 is spend on rangeland, and 1/3 is spent in a CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation). From what I can tell, the time on the rangeland isn’t that bad - they are allowed to graze and basically exhibit pretty natural behavior (although there might be some problems with weather conditions and lackluster veterinary care). The 1/3 spend in a CAFO is much worse, however. They are given inadequate diets that makes them grow faster, but also causes them to be bloated, compressing their lungs and causing ulcers. Meanwhile they breathe various unpleasant gasses such as ammonia and methane. In indoor CAFOs, the cows are stocked much more densely than on outside ones (though not as much as most other animals, still allowing for roaming), and are kept on slatted floors which are uncomfortable for them to stand on. On outside CAFOs the cows have more room, but are vulnerable to uncomfortable and dangerous weather conditions which often result in the death of large amounts of the animals. And then we of course also need to account for the shorter things they are subjected to, such as Painful operations like dehorning and castrations without anesthetic, and stressful transports for many hours. Although these only take up very small parts of the animals’ lives.³

So if you buy a pound of ground meat you are causing a cow to live around waking 16 hours on rangeland and 8 waking hours on a CAFO, as well as experiencing a small fraction of some very painful procedures.

Comparison

So which is worse? I think it is quite obvious that buying a whole chicken causes a lot more harm than having sex with a chicken. Sure, you will probably painfully kill the chicken by having sex with it, but at least you don’t also painfully mutilate it and torture it for 7-weeks straight.

In the case of cows, it is a bit less clear. Is a cow harmed more by you having sex with it than by it being in uncomfortable and stressful conditions for 8 hours, and experiencing a small part of an anesthetic-free surgery? I think it is unclear, but it is at least worth noting that larger animals will be much less likely to be injured from bestiality, and so it will pretty much only be the potential psychological harm done, which is relevant. Now, I’m no cow psychologist, but I suspect that a cow is harmed more, both mentally and physically, from breathing ammonia, having ulcers and being forced to stand uncomfortably for 8 hours, than it is harmed mentally from someone having sex with it for 10 minutes - although I am not at all sure about this.

So it looks pretty clear that the harm caused to animals by buying meat is quite a lot greater in (almost) all cases, than the harm that would be done by having sex with them. So if we assume that something is worse if it causes more harm, all else being equal, then we should think that buying meat is worse than bestiality.

Objections

But is all else equal? Here are some reasons I have heard for thinking that it isn’t. Most aren’t very well-developed in the original reddit comments (to the surprise of everyone, I am sure), so I will try my best to steelman them, but it is a bit of an unthankful task.

Disease Spreading

One of the objections that I saw, which I was not expecting, was an argument to the effect of this:

When humans have sex with animals, it puts them at risk of being infected with several different diseases, some of which can be quite dangerous. Apart from being a very bad decision for your own health, you risk spreading it to other people. But a similar thing cannot be said for buying meat, and so this presents a relevant difference between the two acts.

I think this argument is absolutely terrible. First off, factory farming greatly increases the risk of superbugs, due to the large use of antibiotics in farming. So if anything, disease spread is a bigger reason for avoiding factory farmed meat than for avoiding bestiality. Secondly, most of the diseases spread through bestiality spread through semen, urine, vaginal fluids and fecal-oral contact, so you are not really posing a risk to anyone other than any your potential sexual partners.

Most importantly, however, it is just not clear that it would be a morally relevant difference in any case. We don’t think that it is immoral to go around licking toilet seats or having unprotected sex with people you know to have STDs - it might be very stupid, but it is generally not taken to be immoral. So it is not really clear why it should make the difference here.

Unnecessary suffering

Probably the favorite objection people like to give, and also the most popular argument I have heard in favor of buying meat is the following:

Having sex with animals has no substantive purpose - you are just harming an animal for no good reason. But eating meat has a very good purpose: It keeps you alive. If you don’t eat for a while, you die, but if you don’t have sex for a while, you don’t die. So there is a sufficiently large reason to eat meat, which justifies you in doing so, that isn’t there in the case of bestiality.

This sounds reasonable on the face of it. But it has a very big and obvious problem, which is that you don’t die if you don’t eat meat; you die if you don’t eat food. But for most of the people reading this, it will be of very trivial cost to you to get your nutrition through a plant based diet. You might have to order the slightly less tasty option at the restaurant, and think a bit more about getting enough protein and vitamins, but it will basically just be a small nuisance to you. And so the cost of not eating meat is not dying, but rather being a bit bothered.

Some people, upon hearing this, just dig their heels in. Eating meat is allowed because it is a way to avoid dying, and so you have very strong reason to do so, even if there are alternative options. But just because some action fulfills some need of yours, that you have very strong reason fulfill, doesn’t mean that your reason for performing the action is as big as your reason to fulfill the need - something this response seems to assume. Suppose that you are sitting in a park in the middle of the city and you are averagely wealthy. You are feeling quite hungry and could go and buy some food, but you see someone who left their sandwich on a bench while they are throwing away some trash. So you reason like a meat-eater: If I don’t eat food I will die, and it would be permissible to steal a sandwich in order to avoid dying, so it is permissible for me to run over and steal the sandwich now before the person returns. This is obviously terrible reasoning! You could just buy some food, so you don’t have the same reason for stealing the sandwich as you would if you were dying from starvation and had no other option.

So it looks as though your reason for eating meat is that it is slightly more tasty and convenient, and your reason against it is that the expected outcome of the action is that an animal is severely harmed. The reason a zoophile has for bestiality is that it is a very pleasurable experience, and the reason against it is that it severely harms an animal. Except that the zoophile probably gets more pleasure out of bestiality than you do from eating some chicken nuggets, while the harm caused by buying chicken nuggets is much greater than the harm caused by bestiality. So buying meat is still obviously worse.

But maybe you still just think that there is something very special about an action performed with the goal of staying alive vs. an action performed merely for pleasure, even when there are alternatives available. Let me then present you the following case:

You have just been diagnosed with non-ejaculatory-myocardial-infarction-syndrome, an extremely rare disease that only affects one out of 109 billion people, which causes you to die of a heart attack, if you don’t ejaculate daily. Sadly you live alone on your farm with your cows, however you are also a zoophile. Due to the hard manual nature of your work, your hands are very calloused making it slightly uncomfortable for you to masturbate. You don’t know how to construct a suitable sex toy, and don’t know where to buy one. Are you now justified in having sex with your cows every day so you don’t die, instead of masturbating?

I assume that you, my hypothetical reader, who is not convinced yet, would think that you would be perfectly justified in engaging in bestiality daily in this case. Hopefully not - hopefully you realize that something very harmful being done in order to keep you alive doesn’t make it permissible when there are easy alternatives.

Direct vs Indirect Causation

Some might object on vaguely deontological grounds:

When you engage in bestiality, you are directly harming an animal with your actions, but when you buy meat you are only indirectly harming an animal through a long and complicated chain of causation. And so even if the expected value is the same in both cases, you are allowed to perform the latter but not the former.

I say vaguely deontological, because it feels like something a deontologist would say without recognizably drawing on any deontological principle. I think it feels as though it avoids the doctrine of double effect (DDE), without actually doing so. A clear way of illustrating the DDE is with the classic trolley problem vs. the footbridge case. In the original version, a deontologist would say that you can pull the lever, since the one person dying is an expected but unintended consequence of saving the five. In the footbridge version, however, you shouldn’t push the man, because killing the man is an intended harm done to save the five.

But buying meat is clearly more analogous to the latter: An animal dying is not some sort of unintended consequence of getting your hands on meat - it is the crucial step. And it is just not clear how the length of the causal chain makes any difference: Suppose that instead of pushing the man off the bridge in the trolley problem, you instead activate a big and complicated Rube Goldberg machine that does it for you, still with the intention of pushing the man off the bridge. Here the length of the causal chain clearly makes no moral difference.

Conclusion

I am often astonished at the ability of people on the internet to come up with completely crazy justifications for their views, so there will probably be many strange objections that I have not anticipated. I will let you figure out the lesson of this post, but I will give you a hint and say that you should not conclude that bestiality is permissible.

Now, let me put my brain in a vat of rubbing alcohol to cleanse it after thinking about this topic for so long.

1. Mostly taken from Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation”.

2. I don’t use dollar values here, since it is only the ratio that matters, and not the exact value. Besides, using dollar values would require knowing the markups in the various steps of production, which I don’t.

3. This is mostly taken from here, here and here, as well as Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation”.